PAULA MEHMEL: Shoot the Rapids — The Holy Land, Day 3

PAULA MEHMEL: Shoot the Rapids — The Holy Land, Day 3

Although over the years I have read articles and books about the situation in Palestine and Israel, today as we drove through the West Bank and East Jerusalem on a tour led by Jeff Halper, the founder of the Israeli Committee Against Housing Demolitions, a nonprofit, direct action group dedicated to opposing and resisting the demolition of Palestinian homes, it came alive for me in a new way.

For those of you who follow my blogs, this one will be filled with a lot of statistics and history, but I think that it may be helpful to give those who are not fully versed in the struggle between Palestine and Israel a better understanding of what is going on. Although Jeff is a leader of a group with a very definite political agenda, I made certain to verify this information with others who are connected with the ministry of the Lutheran Church in the Holy Land.

It started 100 years ago, when the British Foreign Minister Balfour declared that the United Kingdom would look favorably on a national homeland for Jews in Palestine, recognizing the Zionist movement. It was, put simply, a classic case of colonialism, where one nation promises another nation its right to a third nation.

Fast forward to 1947, when after the Holocaust and diaspora of the surviving Jews, the United Nations came up with a plan to divide Palestine into two states, to provide the Jews with a homeland. Approximately one-third of the population would be Jews, mostly newcomers, who would receive 56 percent of the land and the remaining two-thirds would be the Palestinians, who traced their ancestral homes back thousands of years and who would receive 44 percent of the land. Approximately 2 percent of those totals would be Jerusalem and Bethlehem, which would be International cities.

The Palestinians rejected this as a takeover of their homeland and after the ensuing war in 1948, Israel triumphed and came out with 78 percent of the land.

That remained the status quo until 1967, when during the 7 Day War, Israel conquered the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip and Palestine became on occupied territory, controlled by Israel.

In 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization declared independence and accepted the idea that there could be two separate states. The Palestinians were willing to give up claims to the 78 percent of the country they had owned prior to 1948 if they could have control of the 22 percent where they were now living, but Israel refused and tensions mounted during the First Intifada as Palestinians revolted for over five years.

The Oslo Accord in 1993 was a declaration of principle that although Israel did not agree to a two-state solution, it was willing to negotiate with the PLO, and the world community had a vision of two states, Palestine and Israel, co-existing together, within five years. In preparation for that, the Palestinian Authority was formed, and there were to be three withdrawals by the Israelis — of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Whether this would have happened or not is unknown, but the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by an extreme right-wing Zionist in November 1995 put an end to any hope for peace through the Oslo Accord. Bibi Netanyahu was elected on an anti-Oslo ticket, and Israeli withdrawals from the occupied territories ceased.

Even as the Israelis are building settlements on Palestinian land, there is a housing crisis in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The Israeli’s want more space for their settlements (communities of up to 120,000 people) and Palestinians want to be able to provide upkeep on their homes, have additions to their space and perhaps add an extra bathroom.

Israeli settlement on West Bank.

Lake at the entrance to Israeli settlement on West Bank.

There is a lot of land available in East Jerusalem to build houses for Palestinians, who need an additional 25,000 housing units to provide adequate housing. But they can’t build on it for two reasons.

One is that they often lack the funds. Seventy percent of Palestinians live below the poverty line. Because the housing market is so tight, the prices are high. In addition, because foreign workers have been brought in to do jobs that Palestinians previously did, because you can pay foreign workers (from East Asia, Africa, etc) below the minimum wage, there is trouble finding employment.

In addition, all of East Jerusalem has been zoned as open green space. That allows Palestinians to own land but they can’t build on it. If they wish to build, they first must apply for a permit to rezone, which costs at least $20,000, which is hard when you are living on $1,200 a month. In addition, it is next to impossible to get a permit, since the commission that makes the decisions is entirely Israeli. Last year, for the 250,000 Palestinians living in East Jerusalem, 18 permits were awarded for any kind of addition or change to a house, no matter how minor.

However, if you don’t get a permit and you make a change to your house, or if you leave the area to work elsewhere, like the West Bank, because there are no jobs, or if the zoning commission finds something wrong with your house when they inspect it, it can schedule your house for demolition.

Since 1967, 50,000 Palestinian houses have been demolished in the occupied territories. Once they are demolished, the Israelis take hold of the land the house was on, rezone it immediately, place an Israeli flag on it and build a new home for an Israeli. As a result, Israel has been able to build massive settlements while Palestinians are not even allowed to add a story to their homes or make a change in their bathrooms.

In addition, the disparities between the Israeli and Palestinian parts of the occupied territories are vast. Palestinians in East Jerusalem are 37 percent of the people, they pay over 50 percent of the taxes and when you look at municipal ledgers, they receive 8 percent of the service — services like sidewalks, adequate water, electricity, regular garbage pick up and paved roads.

Garbage pickup is spotty in areas of East Jerusalem occupied by Palestinians.

The difference between driving through the settlements and the Palestinian areas was profound and readily apparent. One area looked like an upscale suburban neighborhood, and as we drove along, we literally saw “where the sidewalk ends.” The streets narrow and some aren’t paved. There are no streetlights, and it goes from finely manicured public landscaping to literally nothing. It is clear the garbage trucks haven’t been there for a long time. It is the same municipality and tax base, but they clearly have two tiers of services and infrastructure. In a matter of feet, it turns from suburbia to third world public space.

Water usage in the West Bank is a clear example of the disparity. Eight hundred thousand Israelis live in the West Bank and 2.5 million Palestinians. However, the Israelis receive 85 percent of the water resources. Palestinians have barrels on their roofs that water trucks have to fill to preserve water when there are water shortages or no water flows. Israelis have no barrels on their roofs because that never happens to them.

I will write another day about the wall and what that means, as well as reflections on the inequity, but the piece that impacted me so profoundly today was how easy it is for these Palestinians to lose their homes and how unfair the system is. As someone who is about to sign papers to purchase my first home, I am filled with pride that I will at long last be a homeowner. I can’t imagine the feelings that the Palestinians who have lived in the same place for hundreds if not thousands of years experience when they look out the window one day and see that the bulldozers have shown up.

They live with this fear because currently there are thousands of homes slated for demolition, but the authorities do them randomly, without prior notice, keeping people off guard and uncertain. The bulldozers just show up one day and the house is gone. I talked to church leaders who knew of men who literally died of strokes or heart attacks as the demolition occurred and even more who have lost their will to live. It is truly devastating.

Jeff, our Israeli guide for this tour of the inequities between areas, is committed to getting the word out about how this system of home demolition works and how unfair the system is because when he talked to Palestinians, they repeatedly said home demolition was the most demoralizing aspect of their lives.

Sadly, most Israelis are unaware of what is going on. The lives of the Israelis and Palestinians are kept separate, and when you are in a settlement, it is easy to see how you could be unaware of the struggles of a group you have been taught to hate and fear.

My commitment is to share facts that I heard, sights that I saw and stories that are true to help others understand more about the struggles the people living in the occupied territories face. It was a heavy morning, and I know this blog reads like a history lesson, but it is history I learned and feel compelled to share, as I seek to live in solidarity with a people that are clearly oppressed.